The next time your right-wing family member or former high school classmate posts a status update or tweet about how taxing the rich or increasing workers' wages kills jobs and makes businesses leave the state, I want you to send them this article.

According to the latest Demographia International Affordability Housing survey, which ranks the affordability of cities across the globe with major markets of populations over 1 million, New York does not place in the top ten most unaffordable cities in the world.

The lack of civic engagement and participation cedes the power to the few. The few can legislate and elect legislators whose positions are not necessarily consonant with the will or desires of the majority. In essence, it devolves the political system to one of minority rule.

It is true that the rate of economic growth has quickened, but that rate is still low by pre-recession standards. In July the IMF actually cut the U.S. growth forecast for 2014 to just 1.7 percent, the CBO's in August was just 1.5 percent. These are not stellar growth numbers.

With so many business-hub communities surrounding Seattle (more than a dozen not counting bedroom communities), residents desiring low-cost local services do not have to drive far to find businesses not constrained by the new minimum wage.

The progressive tax versus flat tax debate is raging on -- if Illinois moves towards a progressive tax system, where taxes vary based on income, counties with higher median incomes will probably have a lot to say.

The growing profits of some of the nation's largest corporations and wealthiest people in America result from the labor of people whose work is rewarded with poverty level wages. That makes no economic sense. And it's just plan wrong.

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 14,270 -- completely erasing its 54 percent loss between 2007 and 2009. Yet the real median wage is now 8 percent below what it was in 2000, and unemployment remains sky-high.

We define "Creation Nation" as a country in which the private and public sector collaborate to develop and commercialize innovative products and services that create businesses or business opportunities that grow the economy and generate good-paying, value-added jobs.

It's unsettling when the fact checkers get something wrong, as occurred in a recent PolitiFact review of the claim that median incomes rose $5,500 while Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts. PolitiFact grades this claim as mostly true, when it is mostly false.